I must say I appreciate Platt Holden's editorial summaries!
On the one truth / many truths dichotomy, - I have to admit, I don't see the
problem (or at least not clearly!). Surely we are not saying that there is
necessarily a 'competition' between the one and the many? (this is this
thing about 'absolute' distinctions, again). Why can't they quite happily
coexist?
That is to say, if we postulate the 'overall' truth as a concept which
effectively (to us, at least) has no 'edges' or limits or whatever, then we
can easily say that on the one hand it is not, as it were, mathematically
divisible, yet it is equally true that one can have a 'bit' of it - a single
'truth', with edges, which we can ostensibly define the is / is not
boundaries of, and so conceptually grasp and manipulate. This, to my mind,
is what we do when we 'perceive' the world about us; we split the overall
"everything-and-everywhere-ness" of our environment into things, and
processes, and concepts, and relationships between all of these. (I should
say that 'perception' is my field of study). And doing this is what we call
'understanding' the world (as far as we can be said to do so). But it is
important to understand that those subdivisions we choose are not the
'units' that the world is made of -it isn't strictly a reversible process.
So we could never actually find enough bricks to make an infinite wall!
And this of course has implications for the notion that we get our reality
from "direct experience")
So when we say that two truths are apparently mutually contradictory, we are
actually saying that the paradigm which would accomodate both truths is what
we are trying to arrive at. And this is what we mean by growth in
understanding, or enlightenment or whatever, and the process goes on and on
from birth.
Now, I sort of assumed that this was the point of a monism, and that's why
various philosophers throughout the ages relied on 'God' or suchlike, to
validate the rest of their metaphysic. And I must admit, I've lived the last
20 years assuming that this is basically what Pirsig was proposing with
"Quality", and further, that it worked fine for me!
I have to admit, I've never attempted the sort of precision of definition
Pirsig's terms and ideas that this group proposes, even though I'm the first
to quote Neville Moray (Listening and Attention, 1969) :
"Too many meanings, without sufficient precision in their use, without
adequate operational defininition, lead to a concept becoming less valuable
the more promiscuously it is employed."
, in lectures. Nevertheless, when applying such rigorous analysis to
concepts such as 'perception', and 'that which is perceived' (the world
about us), - I've found that such concepts become as slippery as live eels,
and eventually one has to settle for specifying the margin of error, rather
than the exact definition.
So I guess what I'm saying is that I've always used the experience of
reading Pirsig some twenty-odd years ago as a way of conceptualising an
attitude, rather than specific beliefs. So, as soon as an apparent
contradiction shows up, this is a 'signpost' toward some interesting new
feature of the world, and probably presages another bout of shedding
beliefs, rather than accumulating them.
This thing about attitudes points to a way in which pre-intellectual
processes may act in judgement on intellectual ones (to address another
recent thread). And it seems to me to be a fundamental (though rarely
discussed) characteristic of human perception (as with 'cocktail party
effect, and so on)
But am I oversimplifying?
regards
Peter Lennox
Hardwick House
tel: (0114) 2661509
e-mail: peter@lennox01.freeserve.co.uk
or:- ppl100@york.ac.uk
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